America Seen Historically as the New Weimar Republic

About two generations ago, there still lived a remarkable man, an immigrant scholar, teacher, and philosopher, by the name of Leo Strauss, author of Thoughts on Machiavelli and many other such learned texts.

He had tried, valiantly but mainly uselessly, to seriously warn his fellow academics, the cultural elite, and other people that, especially in and by the 1960s, he had correctly perceived that America was definitely on the sad road to recreating the basic situation of a disintegrating, declining Weimar Republic-style country.  The nation’s future was to be filled with gross nihilistic rot, unless a true change in course would come.

This political philosopher had firmly become very convinced by what he had keenly and cogently observed, including his advanced philosophical reflections upon the often hard realities of political life when put under excessive stress.  Terrible results were to be produced, increasingly, by favoring subjectivism and relativism as principles of thought and cognate action.

In addition, this wise scholar had studied and revealed the viciously evil consequences of what necessarily happens when leadership elites become, basically or mostly, enthralled to modern political philosophy in ethically and morally vile terms of Machiavellianism (the ends justify the means) qua power politics supreme, inclusive of all Realpolitik.

He disturbingly saw the increasingly pervasive degeneracy of the dominant elites, the broadly growing and aggressive nihilism of the academics (e. g., applied deconstructionism in nominalist cognition, etc.), the indifference of almost all the most influential intellectuals, and, moreover, the steady decline in needed ethical and moral vigor of the political class itself.  He, thus, quite presciently foresaw the many dangerous and destructive, decadent and degenerate, parallels shockingly growing between the USA and Weimar Germany.

This country’s continuingly massive decline into a libertine kind of horrid sexual license with, e.g., the successful sodomite-liberation movement, ever-expanding access to pornography through the internet, cable/satellite TV, etc.; abortion as a “constitutionally” instituted and affirmed secular sacrament; artificial contraception and divorce seen as just merely normal parts of an assumed and sanctioned domestic reality.

The former leading to socially and culturally acceptable levels of demographic sterility; and, the latter is highly productive of both serial polygamy and serial polyandry, on a much tolerated grand scale no less. Illegal drug usage, particularly marijuana, has greatly flourished; and, tens of millions more freely abuse numerous prescription drugs; millions of children, of course, are, e.g., regularly put on Ritalin.  A drug-saturated culture already, in effect, generally exists as such, as can, thus, be surely recognized.